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what is wrong with the support email?

A topic by Pandora Entertainment created 9 days ago Views: 195 Replies: 12
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Hi,  i recently posted a email to support (287827). i know that i have to wait patiently but that is not the reason i made this post.

I have seen a worry trend of support no responding email unless seen by other means (example: in this forum).

How do I know this? Various documented cases:

-https://itch.io/t/3503913/no-response-to-support-request

-https://itch.io/t/1150326/no-response-to-email

-https://itch.io/t/1603071/cannot-get-reply-to-any-email

-I even have an old case of my own (email sent 9/10/2024. code 233733), that never got a reply.  thankfully that problem was fixed after i send another email y make a post here xd.

I don't like to complain, and I appreciate the work of the itch team (I'm able to publish my game thanks to them). But I find it strange that this problem has been on the platform for so long (I hope it's not a problem with my account. Example: shadow ban).

i will like to heard the community experience with this issue. 

Moderator

...How can there be a shadow ban on support tickets?! Even if there was such a thing as shadow banning on itch.io (that would be news to me).

From what our admins explained recently, support currently handles hundreds of tickets a day. That's the more likely cause.

I was just speculating, but leaving that to the side. the problem still remain (again thank you for the work), but is incredible that a email can go more that 5 month without respond (my previous example: (email sent 9/10/2024. code 233733)

that gives zero feith for the time of respond for my new email (287827).

Moderator(+1)

I've let our admins know.

(+1)
i will like to heard the community experience with this issue. 

I once got a reply after reporting a bug. For other things, there were no responses. 

Most of the time there is no need for a response. Especially for the things you see in community threads. People do not want answers, they want their case to be worked on.

And there might be something fundamentally wrong in how tickets/support requests are queued. It seems as if requests can get lost. Ignored. Misunderstood. There was a virus I told them about. They did absolutely nothing for several months. And I believe to remove an indexed malware to be more important than all those threads about people wanting their game to get indexed faster. The virus was since removed, but probably because I wrote them again, and not because of my initial ticket. This is very worrying. With over a million projects, such requests should not get lost. Because then you get things like I already encountered: malware with an age of up to two years. Out in the open. Uncontested. If I remember correctly, there were even comments on the page about it being a virus. 

I fear that people are not motivated to report malware, because they do not see results. Not even after waiting several weeks. I certainly lose motivation over that. Why bother reporting viruses, if Itch does absolutly nothing from my perspective.

yeah man, the fact that the responses are so eratic + that if you comment here in the 'wrong way' you will be not heard, can be demoralizing.  I wish that itch focus only in the forums, because the email feel abandoned.

The staff doesn't usually read, much less respond to, the forum, mainly because of the problem of discussing topics involving private data in a public medium.

This past month, one of the admins has been reviewing the forum to resolve some payment issues, but I wouldn't consider using the forum a "formal" way to contact the staff.

I agree that not responding, and especially not having a way to know if a ticket is open or closed, is difficult for users. But at the same time, it's difficult to ask the staff to respond to all the requests if you consider that there are very few of them compared to all the people requesting support.

(2 edits)

I understand that the private data part on a public forum is a bad idea, but what I'm saying is that it would be incredible if there was a private system like the itch.io forums.

That said, while I understand that it's difficult for stats to deal with so many people, I find it surprising that a moderator here has already answered my question (more or less), and yet the two support emails I sent (both older that this post) remain unanswered.

Again, my sincere appreciation to the itch.io team, but this is weird to say the least.

Admin(+2)

Our moderator does not have nearly as much work to handle as we do and has no access to our support desk. Naturally as their workload is lower they can respond to forum posts much quicker than staff that is processing support tickets, going through all of our review queues (games, jams, blog posts, users, reports), processing payments, and other far more pressing matters. Your patience is appreciated.

Admin(+2)

As answered by our moderator in this thread, and our administrator in one of the threads you linked, we process hundreds of tickets per day. We are constantly working to improve our flow and avoid missing issues, but we are a small team doing our best.

(I think it is also worth highlighting that the examples you provide above are years old, and do not reflect the increase in support staff nor any other process we have implemented to improve our support desk flow. Additionally, the support ticket you filed with us is less than 12 hours old, it seems that you opened this topic within minutes of filing your ticket, and thus you did not really give us a fair opportunity to get back to your ticket in the first place.)

As highlighted by hechelion earlier as well, I have also personally begun tracking and pushing up support issues that are posted in the forum in order to optimize this process further, but I also have a multiude of roles at itch.io, and as an average human being, I only have so many man-hours in the day, as do the rest of our staff that works on processing support tickets. We naturally have to prioritize cases the higher priority they are, and certain matters require far more attention than others (for example, search indexing, while important, is much lower on our priority list compared to managing account issues, payment issues, addressing game reports, or anything that requires our immediate intervention; search indexing is only one part of the site, and we highly recommend that your promotional efforts be focused towards off-site promotion, rather than relying on being indexed into the new releases section, which is commonly highly populated and has new content being added to it basically every few minutes). 

Thanks for your patience!

(1 edit)

first of all, thank you for you response. I know that the team is working hard i have not doubt about that.

now, this topic is not about my resent request (i hoped that was clear in my first message) is about  the old email request that is 6 month old a never get a response (email sent 9/10/2024. code 233733).

That email number is mine, and as far as i know even today there is not response.

If I hadn't opened another support email request and commented on another post here, I still wouldn't have resolved my issue.

Thanks again to the itch team for the work they do. But this blog post wasn't a complaint due to my new email support requirement. It was because I've seen a pattern of emails that are never answered unless commented here. 

again this email  (sent 9/10/2024. code 233733).  never got a response, and  based on that, I decided to make a post asking the community about their experiences with support email.

Admin(+1)

We may not respond to all requests for support when the issue in question (in your case, indexing) was already solved by another staff member before we saw your ticket. I'm sure you can understand, when we have to address hundreds of tickets a day, lower priority issues may not immediately get a response as we only have so many man-hours in the day. 

I would also like to not encourage opening a thread for people to air out their grievances with our support email, as we've already highlighted several ways in which we are working on it. Having additional voices complain about the same problem that we are working to address does not encourage or engender additional man hours and staff for the problem, it just amplifies community complaints that we are already hard at work trying to address, and these kinds of threads are ultimately not productive to the improvement of our services; they only add additional stress on our staff that is already stretched pretty thin. Thanks for understanding.

Okay, I can understand this. I apologize if I caused the staff too much trouble.

But seriously, the fact that certain messages go unanswered is concerning from the requester's perspective (I don't have all the information at hand, so it feels like I'm being left in the dark).

Again, thanks. I really hope I've just had bad luck with my previous email support requests.

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